New Beginning

Ayesha's POV

I didn't cry until I got home.

In the mall, in front of Chris, I had been steady. My voice hadn't shaken. My hands hadn't shaken. I had looked at him and told him to go away and I had meant every word of it. But the moment my apartment door clicked shut behind me, something in my chest finally gave out, and I slid down against the door and cried until my throat hurt.

It wasn't even about the rejection anymore, or the dress, or Gemma's stupid video. It was about how easy it had been for him to ask "what happened yesterday" like I was the one being unreasonable. Like four years could just be folded up and put away because it was inconvenient for him.

I sat there for a long time. When I finally got up, my legs were stiff and my face felt swollen. I went to the bathroom, washed it, and looked at myself in the mirror. Bony shoulders. Flat chest. The same girl who had been laughed at in a high school hallway, still standing in the same body, still waiting for someone to look at her and decide she was worth keeping.

I was tired of waiting.

The next morning, I called my mother. I hadn't told her about the proposal, or the dress, or any of it. I wasn't ready to hear pity in her voice, not yet. So I kept it simple.

"Mum, I resigned from Azul."

There was a pause. "You loved that job."

"I did. But I think it's time I did something else."

"Does this have anything to do with that man?"

She had never liked that I kept Chris a secret from her too. I used to tell her he was just busy, that successful men were private. Sitting there now, I realized how much of my own life I had spent repeating things Gemma told me until they sounded true.

"It's not about him," I said, which was half a lie. "I just want to start over somewhere. A different part of the city, maybe."

My mother was quiet for a moment, and then she said the thing she always said when she could tell I needed it without me asking. "Whatever you decide, I'm behind you."

That was enough. I hung up and opened my laptop.

I spent the next three days looking at apartment listings on the other side of the city, somewhere far enough that I wouldn't run into anyone from Azul on my way to buy groceries. Somewhere I could walk down a street and not feel a hundred pairs of eyes on me, real or imagined.

I found a small one-bedroom above a shuttered bakery, with creaky floors and a window that looked out onto a narrow street lined with little shops. It wasn't much. The kitchen counter was chipped and the radiator made a sound like someone clearing their throat all night. But it was mine, and nobody there had ever seen the video.

I signed the lease two days later.

Packing up my old apartment was harder than I expected. Not because there was so much to pack — there wasn't, four years of my life fit into nine boxes — but because every object seemed to come with a memory I hadn't asked for. The mug Chris had bought me as a joke after I complained about the office coffee. The cardigan I'd worn the first night he kissed me, back when I still believed being kept secret meant being kept safe. I almost threw the cardigan away. In the end I folded it and put it in the bottom of a box, underneath everything else, where I wouldn't have to see it every day.

I left the ripped green dress where it was, shoved into the back of my closet. I told the moving company not to touch that box. I wasn't ready to decide what to do with it yet, and some decisions don't need to be made in a hurry.

My phone buzzed twice that week with calls from Chris. I let both of them ring out. There was a message too, sitting unopened in my inbox like a small gray stone. I didn't read it. I told myself it wasn't because I was afraid of what it said. I told myself a lot of things that week.

On moving day, two men I'd hired off an app carried my boxes up three flights of narrow stairs while I stood in the empty apartment that had been my whole life for the past two years. I ran my hand along the wall by the door, the one where I used to hang my jacket every evening after work, where I used to stand and replay conversations with Chris in my head, turning every word over like it meant something enormous.

I didn't replay anything this time. I just walked out and locked the door behind me.

The new apartment smelled like fresh paint and dust. I sat on the floor that first night, because the bed wouldn't be delivered until the next day, and ate noodles out of a paper cup while the radiator clanked somewhere behind the wall. It should have felt lonely. Strangely, it didn't. It felt like the first room I had ever stood in that didn't belong to anyone else's idea of who I was.

I thought about my dream that night, the one I had never said out loud to anyone except Gemma, once, years ago. A gallery. Somewhere small, unglamorous, where people who painted in their spare bedrooms and never showed anyone could finally hang something on a real wall and watch strangers stop to look at it.

Gemma had smiled when I told her. "Maybe someday," she'd said, already reaching for her phone, already moving on to something else.

I used to think someday was a long way off. Sitting on the floor of an apartment I had signed for with my own name on the lease, no one else's, I didn't see why it had to be.

I pulled out my phone, opened a blank note, and typed three words at the top: Gallery. Loan. Location.

It wasn't a plan yet. But it was a start, and for the first time since the night my dress had torn open in front of a hundred people, starting something felt like enough.